Automated
Understanding of Captured Experiences

The Automated Understanding of
Captured Experiences project is aimed at reducing
substantially the human input necessary for creating and accessing large
collections of multimedia, particularly multimedia created by capturing
what is happening in an environment.

This project is Funded by the National Science Foundation (Grant # 9806822)
[Sept 1, 1998 - Aug 31, 2001]
(The material presented on this WWW page is based upon work supported
by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 9806822)

Description:

The objective of this research is to reduce substantially the human input
necessary for creating and accessing large collections of multimedia, particularly
multimedia created by capturing what is happening in an environment. The
existing software system which is being used as the starting point for
this investigation is Classroom 2000, a system designed to capture what
happens in classrooms, meetings, and offices. Classroom 2000 integrates
and synchronizes multiple streams of captured text, images, handwritten
annotations, audio, and video. In a sense, it automates note-taking for
a lecture or meeting. The research challenge is to make sense of this flood
of captured data. The project explores how the output of Classroom 2000
can be automatically structured, segmented, indexed, and linked. Machine
learning and statistical approaches to language are used to attempt to
understand the captured data. Techniques from computational perception
are used to try to find structure in the captured data. An important component
of this research is the experimental analysis of the software system being
built. The expectation is that this research will have a dramatic impact
on how humans work and learn, as technology aids humans by capturing and
making accessible what happens in an environment.

R. S. Nikhil, K. Ramachandran, et al., “Space-Time Memory,” In New Ideas
Sesson held at the Eighth International Conference on Architectural Support
for Programming Languages and Operating Systems}, October 1998, San Jose,
CA.